I definitely like Sociabble’s approach to defining employee advocacy and the challenge it represents for companies.

This is not a simple trend. Employee advocacy initiatives have been expanding in the past few years, and there is no sign of a turnaround. “The interest in employee advocacy has grown by 191% since 2013″ says SproutSocial.

If you do a quick query on Google Trends, you can see that the interest in employee advocacy is definitely rising.

According to JEM consulting’s state of employee advocacy, 82% of marketers have an employee advocacy program in place in 2017 and among those who don’t, 26% plan to launch one within the next year.

Ok, that sounds very interesting but what benefits can you expect from employee advocacy?

I found a few data points you might find interesting:

Content shared by employees have a 2x higher engagement versus when shared by a company

So how do you make it happen? The key here is that sharing company content only is not enough. You need 3rd party content. You need to curate.

In a recent post, Sociabble puts it this way: “it’s important to draw in content from third-party sources (such as blogs written by industry commentators); content that your employees will be genuinely interested in, that relates to what they do, and that they will want to share with their own connections. ”

What is content curation?

As we like to say, “Content curation means finding the most relevant information on a given topic and presenting it in a meaningful way for your audience.”

In other words, “ A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community” says content curation influencer Beth Kanter.